Question

Why is nitrogen more electronegative than lithium

Answer 1

Nitrogen is more electronegative than lithium because it has a greater tendency to attract electrons towards itself. This is due to the difference in their atomic structures and the number of available electron orbitals. An example is the formation of ammonia (NH3) where nitrogen attracts hydrogen's electrons more strongly.

Step-by-step explanation:

Electronegativity is the ability of an atom to attract electrons in a chemical bond. Nitrogen has a higher electronegativity value than lithium because nitrogen has a greater tendency to attract electrons towards itself compared to lithium. This is due to the difference in their atomic structures.

Nitrogen has five valence electrons, and three of these electrons are unpaired. This means that nitrogen has more available electron orbitals to attract electrons from other atoms. On the other hand, lithium has only one valence electron, which is unpaired. Therefore, nitrogen can attract electrons more strongly than lithium.

An example to illustrate this is in the formation of ammonia (NH3) from nitrogen and hydrogen atoms. Nitrogen is able to attract hydrogen's electron towards itself, forming a covalent bond. This is because nitrogen's higher electronegativity allows it to pull the shared electron density towards itself more effectively than lithium could.

Answer 2

It has more protons pulling on its electrons. Lithium has 3 protons pulling on its one valence electron (for now I'm going to treat all electrons in the 2s/2p energy level as being equidistant from the nucleus for simplicity), while Oxygen has 8 protons pulling on each electron (ignoring charge screening). So just based on this, you'd expect oxygen to pull on its electrons a little under three times as hard as Lithium (8/3x as hard). Now, since Oxygen has that much more charge pulling those electrons in, they're pulled in a lot closer than that are in Lithium (60pm for 0, 152pm for Li), about 2.5x times closer. Since the force on charged particles is proportional to the product of the charges over the distance squared, you can see Oxygen has a much stronger grip on its valence electrons than Lithium does. To put some (very appropriate) numbers to it, Oxygen's pull is proportional to 8/60^2 = .0022, and Lithium's pull is 3/152^2 = .00013. So very roughly the force on the electrons in O are about 17x higher than the electrons in Li. It's a lot more complicated than this,

but this is the basics of it.